A note to our listeners

This week we will begin communicating directly with a small number of our listeners as we introduce a 40-hour-per-month limit on free mobile listening.

Most of you reading this will never hit the limit. In fact, it will affect less than 4% of our total monthly active listeners. For perspective, the average listener spends approximately 20 hours listening to Pandora across all devices in any given month.

That said, limiting listening is a very unusual thing to do, and very contrary to our mission so we wanted to share a quick explanation. Pandora’s per-track royalty rates have increased more than 25% over the last 3 years, including 9% in 2013 alone and are scheduled to increase an additional 16% over the next two years. After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption.

For listeners who do hit the limit, we have a variety of options available to keep the music you love flowing. Listen for free for as many hours as desired on desktop and laptop computers; pay $0.99 for unlimited listening for the remainder of that month, or subscribe to Pandora One for unlimited listening and no advertising.

In short, this is an effort to balance the reality of increasing royalty costs with our desire to maximize access to free listening on Pandora. We will be sure to alert any of our listeners that start getting close to the 40 hour limit. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Tim Westergren

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633 thoughts on “A note to our listeners”

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I listen to the Free Pandora at work, but for some reason within the last month all the commercial advertisements have gone to Spanish. Any idea how this happened and why? I do not speak it and do not wish to listen to the spanish ads either. HELP!!!

With content that follows on my stations dissimilar and repetitive I joined P1 thinking I could skip unwanted tunes and get better service. My mistake for assuming P1 would improve my listening experience and provide me greater variety and convenience other than not listening to crappy ads on the “free” version. I’m outa here!

OMG noooo ! I listen to pandora everyday ! I haven’t put any music on my iPhone because I like pandoras vierity , now when I lock my phone I can’t listen to music , this is some bull!!! You guys are trying to make money buy letting us know we can purchase pandora with no ads. Watch there will be another app/site with free music pshh.

I don’t know whether it’s just me or if perhaps everyone else experiencing issues with your website.
It appears as though some of the written text within your content are running off the screen. Can someone else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to
them as well? This may be a issue with my internet browser because I’ve had this happen previously.

Don’t be cheap people. You pay for what you get. You want crappy experience, go cheap. You want the best, fork out 5 bucks a month. Been using Pandora for a long time and it has been a wonderful experience.

well Pandora I do believe that you are foolish to believe that people are going to want to pay the price for Pandora 114 literally a couple of dollars more they can get Spotify or Google Play and have many many many more features including free downloads and off mobile playing I’ve been in user for many years probably since I was at the age of 14 I’m 23 now and between this and the constant bombardment of Spanish commercials you have nailed the final nail in the coffin and it’s time to me to move on it’s sad to see you go but its your own doing I will be joining Google Play I would love to see you guys jump forward and adapt features like Spotify and Google Play maybe then I would consider coming back to you as you’ve always been a long time favorite

After Pandora was sold it started to SUCK. About the same amount of commercials as the radio. Also anytime you skip a song they give you a 30 second commercial. The new owners of this previously awesome site have ruined it. I almost never use Pandora anymore. The free version is almost as bad as the radio.